Weekend Work - Saturday, July 12

What a Saturday.

It started with a PC that had been at the office for a week or more. The owner was away on vacation and I was working on trying to get it to come back up. It arrived 'dead' and appeared to have suffered from a virus outbreak, trashing the registry.

The owner was mostly just concerned about the drive data, in particular, their purchased iTunes music. I told them I could recover it and then reinstall Windows, which is what I was doing.

It was an eventful day, with one of my former bosses bringing his two PCs by to get them processed and cleaned up. One of them, a Windows 98 notebook with a 4gb drive, just needed some apps removed as it had less than 100mb free on boot. I cleared off 1gb of unneeded junk.

The second PC, a desktop, was not so lucky. It had several dozen malware apps running on it. Boot time for the desktop was just about 7 minutes with the malware running. When it left the office, malware free, boot time was under one minute and 30 seconds.

My buddy, Ken, stopped for a few minutes as well. After having been led astray on two recent business ventures, he was 'cooling his jets' a little and trying to recover some spent capital from some questionable business men. I hope he can, but I think the money is long gone. Time will tell.

I placed the micro-ATX power supply in the Sony Vaio desktop and was able to get it off the bench. I scanned it for malware just in case and it was mostly clean. I removed everything nefarious, optimized it for speed and sent the owner on his way with it.

A recent customer brought in another PC for repair, this time by proxy. It was for him, but someone else dropped it off. It wasn't the one I had worked on before and the person dropping it off had no idea what was wrong with it. I tagged it and put it aside while I cleared the bench of the three I was working on.

A new customer dropped off a PC that he said had a virus. It was rebooting as soon as it started up. I have seen that before and told him it would be tomorrow before I could look at it. Under promise and over deliver, that's my motto. He was in no hurry, he said, so I tagged it and put it aside as well.

As I was working on three machines at once, I saw someone open the door about 4 pm and it was Leroy. Those who have read my other stuff know about Leroy.

He stayed until I shut the doors at 5 pm (closing time). I had so many things to go, but I couldn't get any work done with him sitting there talking. I left, grabbed some food at Burgers and Billiard's and then went back to the office later. I worked until about 10:30 pm and then headed home.

During my 'evening shift', I accomplished quite a bit. I was able to get the data off the dead PC and reinstalled Windows. I applied all of the updates and then moved the data back onto the drive. I still needed to reimport the iTunes data, but that would have to wait until tomorrow to complete.

The PC that came in by proxy was infested with malware. I found over 1000 pieces of malware on the system, over 500 of them the difficult-to-remove Virtumonde. My the time I had it completely clean, I had invested several hours in it. But, it was clean now and with the discountinued use of Limewire, would probably stay that way. It had a virus scanner on it, but the malware had disabled it. I re-enabled and updated it and started a complete scan.

The former bosses PC was also one I worked on mostly during the evening and left it scanning all night, removing dormant viruses.

I left the office with the proxy PC, the former bosses PC and the data-recovery PC all busy working. Seemed like a good time to go catch some shut eye. Minus the hour for dinner (no lunch today), I had been at it since 8:30 am this morning and it was just after 10:30 pm.